The Ocean’s Menagerie

Author Drew Harvell
Narrator Andi Arndt
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 24 April 2025
Run Time 6 hours and 53 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biodiversity, Marine biology, Popular science, The Earth: natural history: general interest, Zoology: invertebrates.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A transporting exploration of the deep sea, and how our planet’s strangest, most ancient and astonishing creatures have urgent relevance to cutting-edge science today.

Hundred-year-old giant clams, coral kingdoms the size and shape of cities, and jellyfish that glow in the dark: ocean invertebrates are among the oldest and most diverse organisms on Earth, seeming to bend the rules of land-based biology. Although sometimes unseen in the deep, these incredible spineless creatures contain 600 million years of adaptation to problems of disease, energy consumption, nutrition, and defence.

Marine ecologist Dr Drew Harvell takes us diving from Hawaii to the Salish Sea, from the Caribbean to Indonesia, to uncover the incredible underwater ‘superpowers’ of spineless creatures: we meet corals many times stronger than steel or concrete, sponges who create potent chemical compounds to fight off disease, and sea stars who garden the coastlines, keeping all the other nearby species in perfect balance. As our planet changes fast, the biomedical, engineering and energy innovations of these wondrous creatures hold ever more important secrets to our own survival.

The Ocean’s Menagerie is a tale of biological marvels, a story of a woman’s passionate connection to an adventurous career in science and a call to arms to protect the world’s most ancient ecosystems.

'Revelatory' WILLIAM GIBSON
'Each page is full of wonder and surprise' STEVE BRUSATTE
'Magic' TOM MUSTILL

© Drew Harvell 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

The ocean is where all life began, four billion years ago, but as humans we only ever get to glimpse a fraction of it. Luckily the marine biologist Drew Harvell has donned her scuba gear and met some remarkable marine creatures -- and she tells us about their fascinating lives in this book

The Times, *Best Books of 2025 so far*

Thank goodness for marine biologists such as Drew Harvell to take us on undersea safaris ... In The Ocean's Menagerie she [Harvell] dons her scuba gear so we don't have to, and recounts a lifetime of experience meeting the remarkable marine creatures that almost nobody else will ever get to see... [An] enchanting book

The Times, *Book of the Week*

Harvell ... reveal[s] some of the exceptional attributes of ... underwater marvels

Financial Times, *Books to Look Out For 2025*

[A] fascinating new book... [Harvell] writes vividly and with tangible delight about this strange world, zooming in on a series of the most striking of these animals

Spectator

In this enchanting book she [Harvell] uses the complex histories of eight underwater creatures to showcase the mind-boggling variety of marine life

Sunday Times, *Summer Reads of 2025*

A vividly revelatory exploration of a more ancient biological universe, adjacent yet largely invisible to our own and offering countless benefits to humanity's future

William Gibson, author of Agency

A love letter to the ocean, and its weird and wonderful creatures, from an eminent explorer and marine biologist. Each page is full of wonder and surprise, and in every tale of a shape-shifting octopus or luminous jellyfish, we are reminded why the ocean is worth conserving

Steve Brusatte, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

The Ocean's Menagerie is a marine smorgasbord of the spineless. Her life's-work, exploring the cracks and crevices of seafloors across the world is the backbone of a story full of overlooked organisms who thrive without one. What she has discovered is magic and bewildering, astonishing creatures that challenge our idea of animalhood and pull off biological tricks that transform our landlubber lives. This will make you look again at the marine lives around you, whether you swim past them or encounter them on the shore. The exquisite and strange inventions marine invertebrates have evolved are as surprising and wonderful as the glass miniatures that unite her journeys. It is the portrait of the deeply human activity of marine biology that I loved most; Harvell not only helps you understand the startling lives of marine invertebrates but does so through an immersion in the lives of the funny, impressive and peculiar people who peer together through the waters of the world

Tom Mustill, author of How To Speak Whale

Creatures without backbones are more than 99 percent of our planet's animal species. Ocean invertebrates have billions of years of experience living, changing and proliferating into an astonishing array of shapes, sizes, and ways of living. They're more diversely weirder -- and more mysterious -- than big, bony, familiar animals. Drew Harvell has explored, thought deeply about, seen deeply into, and actually lived in the ocean. The ocean's life is woven into her own. She is deeply in love with her amazing subjects. And a few pages into this warm and wondrous book, you will be too

Carl Safina, New York Times bestselling author of Beyond Words

Dr. Drew brings us a magnificent stable of marine critters, so beautiful as to be almost art, so astonishing in their lifestyles as to be almost superheroes. She delivers smooth prose like the incoming tide, building a depth of feeling and flow of discoveries to let us see, underneath every wave and in every sea, how thrillingly complex and stunningly lovely ocean wildlife can be

Stephen Palumbi, author of The Extreme Life of the Sea

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